Saturday, March 14, 2009

By the time the next decade rolls around in about a year, discussion about the eighth generation of video game consoles will begin to heat up. However, these days, nobody really cares, mesmerized by their current systems and their advancements. Wii's motion control, Xbox's online experience and Playstation's hi-definition gaming are all pretty cool. Still, there are definitely improvements that can be made to each of these in their successors (the Wii 2, Xbox Next and Playstation 4 respectively).

Wii

Make the motion control more accurate

I rarely play my Wii but I vaguely recall playing Wii Golf on the Wii Sports disc. And let me summarize in two words: It sucked! The character would simply refuse to react to any motions while putting was almost impossible as the power was almost always distorted.

Improve games

The variety is fine but the ones that are out there are not quality games. They're basically a bunch of mini-game packs. In other words, make a few non-kiddish games that hardcore gamers would like. The gameplay is good on Wii but the other smaller features are horrendous.

Improve graphics

The Wii's unacceptable graphics pale in comparison to that of the Xbox and PS3. In fact, this is one of the main reasons people are straying away from this system.

Improve online experience

Some people might ask me, "How can you improve the online experience if there's none to talk about?" Ok, this is stretching it just a little bit. Wii does support online capability but just barely. There's no chat feature, community lobby/homepage, any downloadable content other than "channels" and it's agonizingly slow.

Xbox

Reduce number of errors

The notorious red rings of fire phase was enough to make any gamer impatient so the NextBox better be virtually error-free or the gaming world is bound to turn on them.

Increase PC connectability

The PC connectability was definitely not lacking in the 360 but it can be improved. I can see somewhere along the road, from the Xbox, you would be able to access and edit Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Publisher files or perhaps even PDFs. Being able to change some of the computer settings would be nice too although this may raise some security issues.

Do not implement motion control

Motion control will surely crapitize the amazing game line-up that the Xbox features. Developing for motion controls is much harder to do than developing for buttons and thus the neat features of the current Xbox games would be excluded. This would kill the Xbox.

Playstation

Lower the price

I'll say one thing. The starting price of the PS4 can't be $800 or even $500; $400 is pretty much a maximum, especially if this economic downturn continues. I'd say the price was the one biggest turn-off of the PS3 at launch and Sony can't afford for it to happen again.

Increase game line-up, introducing new games and expanding current franchises

The PS3's games aren't spectacular although they definitely trump Wii's. They absolutely need improvement though as hyped games did not exactly turn out while non-hyped ones didn't either. Do see the dilemma here?

Remove the motion control

The "Six-Axis" motion control in the PS3 was simply a load of crap; if you're not going to do it right, why do it at all? This screwed up the games quite a bit and was totally pointless.

Improve the Playstation Network

Sony will have to think outside the box a little bit for their next PSN update. The Playstation Network is currently mediocre. It's better than the Wii's but not as good as the Xbox's. However, PSN actually has a lot of features that Xbox Live has but just does not have that special touch.

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This blog will showcase the many useful websites, software and gadgets that I come across every day. But no, I vow not to ramble on about RAM or megapixels, both of which I barely know a thing about. This is the tech blog for the rest of us. By that I mean, the non-geeks.